Guidepoint Qsight says 52% of the patients a practice saw in 2024 came back in 2025. The American Med Spa Association says 73% of med spa patients are repeat patients. Both figures are real, both get quoted as "retention", and they do not measure the same thing.

An owner who pulls a med spa KPI from the booking system and holds it against a published one is usually comparing two different formulas.

So this guide does three things for each of eight monthly numbers: defines it, gives the formula, and says whether a published reference point exists. Four have one. Four don't, and I'd rather say so than borrow a figure from a software vendor's blog.

The eight, with formulas

NumberFormulaPublished reference point
Year-over-year retentionPatients seen in both years ÷ patients seen in the earlier year52% industry, 63% "top-performing" practices (Qsight, 2024 to 2025, non-surgical, same-store)
New patientsFirst-ever visits in the month496 per practice in 2025, down 6% (Qsight, same-store)
Spend per patientTrailing 12-month revenue ÷ unique patients in those 12 months$1,576 in 2025 (Qsight, non-surgical, same-store)
Spend per visitMonth's revenue ÷ month's visits$527 (AmSpa 2024 report, survey of med spa professionals)
Rebooking rateVisits that end with a next appointment on the books ÷ visitsNone found
Revenue per provider hourMonth's treatment revenue ÷ scheduled provider hoursNone found
Room utilisationBooked room-hours ÷ available room-hoursNone found
Product cost shareInjectable product used ÷ injectable revenueNone found

The two sources are built differently. Qsight's figures come from its Sales Measurement transaction data on a same-store basis and exclude surgical transactions; the deck they appear in was presented by Erik Haines at the Octane Aesthetics Forum on January 8, 2026 and carries no fuller methodology. AmSpa's come from a survey of med spa professionals, published in 2024, whose location counts are for 2023; Qsight's are for 2025. Never average across them.

They don't even reconcile inside one report. AmSpa's executive summary gives 245 patient visits a month and $527 a visit, which multiplies out to $129,115 a month, or about $1.55 million a year. The same summary puts average annual revenue at $1,398,833. That is an 11% gap, and it is what you get when averages come from separate survey questions.

A worked month

Everything in this section is an illustration. The practice, its figures and its hours are our assumptions, chosen to show the arithmetic.

Take a two-room practice with two injectors. In the month it billed $118,000 across 236 visits, so spend per visit is $500, a little under AmSpa's $527. Of those visits, 38 were first-ever patients. Qsight's 496 a year works out to about 41 a month.

Retention needs two years of data. Say 1,150 patients were seen in the 12 months that ended a year ago, and 598 of them have been back in the 12 months since: 598 divided by 1,150 is 52%, level with Qsight's industry figure and 11 points short of its top performers. (The deck doesn't define "top-performing", so don't lose sleep over the 63%.)

Add the year's 456 new patients to the 598 returners and the practice has 1,054 unique patients. Trailing revenue of $1,416,000 divided by 1,054 is $1,343 per patient, about 15% below Qsight's $1,576. Spend per visit is within $27 of AmSpa's figure, which hints that the gap is visits per patient more than price. Treat that as a hint only: the two benchmarks come from different sources built different ways, and Qsight publishes no visits-per-patient figure.

Now the four with no outside yardstick. If 142 of the 236 visits ended with the next appointment booked, rebooking is 60%. Two injectors scheduled for a combined 280 hours brought in $118,000, or $421 per provider hour. Two rooms open 40 hours a week give about 347 room-hours a month, and 215 booked hours is 62% utilisation. Injectables brought in $70,000 and the practice used $23,800 of product to do it: 34%.

Is 62% utilisation good? Nobody has published a number that would tell you. What you can say is whether it was 55% in the spring.

Where it goes wrong

Mixing definitions is the expensive mistake, and the opening pair is the classic case. AmSpa's 73% is the share of a practice's patients who are repeat patients. A practice that stopped attracting anyone new would watch that figure climb toward 100% while it slowly shrank. Qsight's 52% asks a harder question: of the people you saw last year, how many came back?

Researchers use a third definition. A 2026 study of 14,916 injectable patients at 17 Australian clinics, which we summarised here, measured retention at 183 days and included only patients who had already received at least two treatments. Its percentages are not a yardstick for a practice counting every first-timer. (The work was funded through an educational grant from Galderma Australia.)

Small numbers are the second trap. With 38 new patients in a month, a swing of five either way is 13%, and it means nothing. Read new patients, rebooking and spend per visit monthly, but as a three-month average. Retention and spend per patient only make sense on a trailing 12 months.

Product cost goes wrong at the purchase order. If you're the kind of practice that orders toxin twice a month, purchases and usage roughly track. Place one $41,000 order to reach a rebate tier, though, and a ratio run on purchases reads 59% against the same $70,000 of revenue. Run it on usage: opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock. Decide once whether you count cost before or after manufacturer rebates, and never switch.

What depends on your contracts and your state

Rebate and loyalty terms are set in each practice's agreement with the manufacturer, and they change. Your product cost share is comparable to your own history, not to a colleague's at the Medical Spa Show.

Memberships distort the revenue line. Under accrual accounting, cash collected for treatment not yet delivered is not this month's revenue, a point we worked through in our guide to membership pricing. Build spend per visit and revenue per provider hour on treatments delivered, and ask your accountant how the booking system's export treats prepaid credit.

Revenue per provider hour invites one more step, which is paying on it. Whether pay may be tied to revenue from medical treatments depends on your state, so put that question to a health-care attorney there before the number goes anywhere near a compensation plan.

Sources